Fragments of a thought pieced together from associated thoughts, memories of a past time brought into present time, together with things thought about in future time. Words can snatch at things, pin them down and they say what they are. Any ‘new’ experience is assimilated and the actuality of it is filtered, obscured, cloaked.

Then pause for a moment, and everything stops, just the circumstance itself – there is only one moment, only one, going on all the time. I wake up to it every now and then, there and then, here and now in this place and time, but it is always now, the present now, the forever ‘now.’

“Time is in the mind; space is in the mind. The law of cause and effect Is also a way of thinking. In reality, all is here and now and all is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only.” [Nisargadatta]

I write it in my notebook, in the time taken to do that the thinking sequence seems to have jumped from the thing I’m thinking about, to the next, and then there’s a space … the smallest instant before it becomes something else. In the interval the mind is engaged in ‘thinking it’, everything moves on and I can never seem to catch up. Language is an overlay placed on reality, gives everything an identity, duality, ‘me’ and ‘you.’ Language tells the story, creates a fiction I get lost in. Nothing is what I think it is.

The present moment feels like it’s an immediate event occurring ‘now’, but there’s also a feeling that it comes from some timeless place. What we have is applied time, an agreed-upon measurement that we all apply.  Who‘s to say? Maybe this is something that has not happened yet… it happens later, gets reflected upon and what I think is ‘now’ is actually a moment of hindsight that had its origin in future time.

How can I be sure things are what I think they are when I’ve only just started feeling my way through something not experienced yet? Consciousness, the vast present time – the continuing ‘now’ phenomenon enfolding and unfolding, transforming from the future into past in one continuous surging-through movement that cannot be explained. What a strange mystery it is; future time slides into present time, tomorrow becomes today, ‘now’ falls back into yesterday, something ‘remembered.’

Mind creates a structure to explain time; otherwise, how could we understand the enigma of how the past is ‘gone’ and the future is not here yet? Hovering on the brink of the smallest pause before it gets there, the empty space of not-knowing what it is, and held like this for an instant…

“There exists only the present instant… a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.”
 [Meister Eckhart 1260 – 1328]

[First published, June 17, 2022]